Jon Weil On How Tim Geithner's Credibility Hit The Triple Hooks (And Is Staring The Single Ds In The Face)

Fox Business reporter Peter Barnes
began his televised interview with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner two days ago with this question: “Is there a risk that
the United States could lose its AAA credit rating? Yes or no?”

It’s enough to make you wonder: How could Geithner know
this to be true? The short answer is he couldn’t.

All you have to do is read the research reportStandard &
Poor’s published on April 18 about its sovereign-credit rating
for the U.S., and you will see it estimated the risk of a
downgrade quite succinctly. “We believe there is at least a
one-in-three likelihood that we could lower our long-term rating
on the U.S. within two years,” said S&P, which reduced its
outlook on the government’s debt to “negative” from
“stable.”

There you have it: Geithner says the chance of a downgrade
is zero. S&P says the odds it will cut its rating might be
greater than one out of three. So who are you going to believe?
Geithner? Or the people at S&P who actually will be deciding
what S&P will do about S&P’s own rating of U.S. sovereign debt?

It would be one thing to express the view that a downgrade
would be unwarranted, or that the chance of it happening is
remote. Either of these positions would be defensible. Geithner
went beyond that and staked out an absolutist stance that reeks
of raw arrogance: There is no risk a rating cut will occur. He
left no room for a trace of a possibility, ever.

Battling Barney

The mystery is why Geithner would say such a thing. What’s
he going to do if S&P or some other rating company winds up
disagreeing with him? Send Barney Frank to beat them up? The
problem for leaders who make indefensible claims like this one
is that, after a while, nobody knows whether to believe anything
they say. Just remember all those government officials inGreece, Ireland and Portugal who kept saying their countries
didn’t need bailouts, long after it became clear they did.

This was the same answer Geithner gave during an ABC News
interview in February 2010, when asked if the U.S. might lose
its AAA rating. “Absolutely not,” he said. “That will never
happen to this country.” So, an asteroid could destroy the
entire Eastern seaboard 100 years from now. And, in the world
according to Geithner, we’re supposed to believe America’s top
rating would be safe.

Perhaps Geithner would be well-positioned to make such
assessments if he were the only person on the planet with the
authority to grade sovereign debt -- and if there were zero risk
that he would ever die. Not only is Geithner mortal, he doesn’t
even work for a nationally recognized statistical rating
organization.

Great Error

In one of the great errors of financial history, the U.S.
long ago bestowed that vaunted designation on the likes of S&P
and Moody’s Investors Service. The raters showed they could becorrupted when they put their AAA marks on countless subprime
mortgage bonds that quickly turned sour. Unlike the companies
that bought those labels, though, the U.S. government didn’t
solicit S&P’s ranking of its debt. Trying to predict with
certainty what the raters may do next is a fool’s game.